Update — Aug. 23, 2026: The reunion this post pointed toward will not extend to New York. Serena Williams will play the US Open Mixed Doubles Championship with Carlos Alcaraz on a wild card announced Saturday, and will not play singles; the wild card held open for her went to Sofia Kenin. Venus Williams already holds a women’s singles main-draw wild card. There is no Williams sisters doubles entry at Flushing Meadows.
Update — Aug. 18, 2026: The doubles match was played Monday night and the sisters lost it, 2-6, 6-1, 8-10 to Marta Kostyuk and Peyton Stearns. They trailed 6-0 in the match tiebreak and came most of the way back before a Venus double fault on match point ended the comeback. It was their first doubles match together since the 2022 US Open. Venus finishes her Cincinnati week without a win in either draw, and the question of whether the sisters play US Open doubles together is still open — full report here.
Update — Aug. 16, 2026: The Williams sisters are not on Sunday’s order of play. The Cincinnati Open scheduled eight women’s doubles matches for the opening day of the doubles draw, and the Venus and Serena Williams meeting with Peyton Stearns and Marta Kostyuk was not among them. Kostyuk is instead listed for a singles second-round match against Sofia Kenin. The doubles first round runs through Monday, Aug. 17, and the match is expected to be played then, though the tournament has not announced a court or a start time. Passages below were written when the doubles draw was released and referred to a Sunday start.
Venus Williams has played her last singles match of the 2026 Cincinnati Open, and what remains of her week is the match most people came to see anyway. Williams lost in the first round on Friday to Emiliana Arango, a 25-year-old Colombian qualifier ranked 95th, 6-2, 6-2 in 1 hour and 5 minutes on the grandstand court at the Lindner Family Tennis Center. She was broken in the opening game and never recovered the initiative.
The 46-year-old entered the WTA 1000 event on a singles wild card, one of seven the tournament awarded to women. Arango converted four of her five break points and won 71 percent of the points behind her first serve. Williams made 41 percent of her own first serves and had a single break chance, which she did not take. Arango next plays Iga Swiatek, who arrives in Ohio with a Cincinnati title to defend.
Williams has not won a singles match since July 22, 2025, when she beat Peyton Stearns 6-3, 6-4 in the first round of the DC Open in Washington. That result made her the oldest woman to win a tour-level singles match since Martina Navratilova, then 47, won at Wimbledon in 2004. Stearns will be on the other side of the net in the doubles.
Venus and Serena Williams received a doubles wild card and will play Stearns and Marta Kostyuk in the first round of the doubles draw. It will be the sisters’ first match as a team since the 2022 US Open, and their first appearance together at this tournament. Between them they have won 14 Grand Slam doubles titles and three Olympic gold medals, the most recent major coming at Wimbledon in 2016.
The reunion has been postponed once already. The pair were entered in the Wimbledon doubles this summer before Serena pulled out with a right knee injury, having lost her singles opener to Maya Joint. She then did not appear in Toronto. Cincinnati is her first tournament since. “I’m excited and hope that we can both go into it fresh,” Venus Williams said of the doubles.
Cincinnati is not a neutral venue for the elder sister. The tournament lists her career record here at 12-10, with a semifinal in 2012 and a quarterfinal in 2019, and it was in Cincinnati in August 2023 that she recorded the singles win that stood as her most recent until Washington. She first played on the WTA Tour in 1994 and has won 49 tour singles titles, seven of them majors, along with Olympic singles gold in 2000. She held the No. 1 ranking for 11 weeks.
Her summer does not end in Ohio. Williams is entered in the US Open mixed doubles with Alexander Bublik, in the revamped event played across the tournament’s opening days, while her route into the US Open singles draw still depends on a wild card the USTA has not announced. Much of her schedule since Washington has been built around doubles rather than singles, including an entry with Alexandra Eala at the DC Open.
The match is not a formality. Stearns and Kostyuk are established tour players, both ranked inside the top 60, and the Williams sisters have not competed as a team in nearly four years. Neither has arrived in Ohio in form. But the appeal was never the seeding. It is a hard court outside Cincinnati, two weeks before the last major of the season, and for the first time since 2022 both sisters intend to walk out on the same side of it.
